Daisy Martinez Carranza ’25

Years ago, as an undergraduate at the University of Central Arkansas, Daisy Martinez Carranza put together a five-year plan.

She already had work experience in the marketing arena, and an internship with Blue Cross Blue Shield Arkansas helped her to better understand the role that data could play in fine-tuning a marketing effort.

The plan she developed built on this knowledge: Complete her bachelor’s degree in usiness administration, earn a master’s degree in business analytics, and land a job using data to drive marketing for a big company.

In her present role as a media performance analyst at SAP, Martinez Carranza has checked all of those boxes and now works to optimize the company’s outreach.

“I look at how SAP approaches their marketing efforts in terms of targeting different people, targeting different markets, allocating different products across different countries and different regional areas,” she says.

“At the end of the day, everybody’s trying to create new products and launch better solutions,” she says, adding that data-driven decision making helps to ensure those offerings hit the mark.

“We’re analyzing different customerjourney touchpoints to see where we can optimize in order to further nurture highly-engaged prospective clients.”

A native of Honduras, Martinez Carranza picked LeBow over a nine-month data analytics certificate program, thinking the MS would have more substance, and now says her LeBow experience primed her for success in her current role.

“Other programs that I was looking at were very heavy on data-mining and statistics, and that just was not the focus that I wanted,” she says. “The LeBow program had the option to take electives in other core functional areas of business — like marketing, supply chain and finance — and that was very attractive.”

She envisioned a career that combines her marketing experience with her data savvy, and LeBow offered a path that led in that direction. She was also attracted by the resources available at the school, particularly the Center for Applied AI and Business Analytics, which partners with major companies for experiential courses.

For Martinez Carranza’s capstone course, he center partnered with Precisely, a software company specializing in data integrity tools. Martinez Carranza’s team helped the company better understand its customers, and the That experience reinforced her belief in her own ability to put data to work.

“The takeaway for me was that there are countless things that you can do with data, and your creativity is really what will get you to the finish line,” she says.

“Because I was leading that team and I had a marketing background, doing a market segmentation approach made sense to me,” she recalls. “When we gave our final capstone presentations, the company’s leadership provided such good feedback and told our group specifically that ours had a ‘story’ throughout the whole presentation, which was really our goal.”

That experience bolstered her confidence in her own abilities. “I know that if there’s a problem, I’m going to figure it out how to solve it,” she said. “It proved to me that I can master hard things in a very short amount of time, if I really am committed to it.”

She’s especially grateful that her capstone professor, Assistant Clinical Professor of Decision Sciences Simon Spavound, PhD, encouraged students to find their own way, rather than directing expectations about process and product.

“I learned a lot about navigating uncertainty and just being able to pivot really quickly,” she said. “And that is how the world works: not just at SAP, but in any company.”